Strato Pi CAN review

The Raspberry Pi has slowly been making its way from the digital hobbyist’s garage into professional manufacturing environments. SferaLabs specialises in smart control systems, and its Strato Pi boards are a great attempt to add commercial-grade hardware to the Raspberry Pi board. There’s a range of different boards available, and we’re looking at the top-of-the range CAN board, which has all the bells and whistles.

The full article can be found in The MagPi 61 and was written by Lucy Hattersley.

Most of the Strato Pi boards accept 9-28 V, while this board uses 9-65 V DC power. A high-quality power supply ensures reliable operation of a Raspberry Pi when it’s being used 24/7. The board has a step-down converter to provide the 3 A continuous output. It also features power surge protection (up to ±500 V, 2 ohms, 1.2/50 μs).

The CAN board also features UPS (uninterruptible power supply). In the event of power loss, it offers enough time to save data and perform a clean shutdown.

Another nifty feature is Hardware Watchdog, which monitors the software running on the Pi. The Strato Pi Can monitors a GPIO 5 heartbeat pin (which takes less than 60 seconds to change state). If it doesn’t see a change, it initiates a shutdown procedure and raises GPIO 12 to HIGH, which can signal to your code that a watchdog timeout has occurred, allowing you to run a script.

On the end of the Pi CAN board is an 11-position terminal block. Power runs into this block, and it provides a CAN (Controller Area Network) bus and RS-485 ports, both of which can be used at the same time. The CAN controller is used in automotive environments, and you can use it to interface with a car’s internal network.

Eight of the GPIO pins are used to control the real-time clock, CAN controller, buzzer, and for power management; but you can still use the remaining pins for pass-through control. You can view circuit diagrams and find usage instructions in the user guide and schematics.

A Strato Pi utility is used to control the buzzer, watchdog, and UPS, installed using:

sudo wget http://sferalabs.cc/files/strato/strato

Last word

4/5

Strato Pi CAN is a high-quality board, with specific features for use in a production environment.